Steve O’Donnell of Greenbytes

On the 21st of August, I interviewed Steve O’Donnell – CEO of Greenbytes. In the first part of the interview I covered the reasoning behind Greenbytes’ move toward 100% software only. In the second part, I asked Steve about his views on the storage market and asked some questions about his personal drive & background.

Some of my questions were inspired by an interesting interview on Techcrunch with Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha where he explains (jump to 02:00) that in his view, the best startups offer a disruptive solution that fits into an existing structure that the customer is already using. He convincingly explains how flash virtualization startup Pernix Data fits those parameters, but left some question marks in explaining how Nutanix (also in his portfolio) meets those requirements.

I have been interested to hear the views on converged technologies and how disruptive technologies can be made to fit customers’ existing infrastructure. Steve has interesting views on these points that shine through in this second part of the interview.

How do you view the converged technologies like Nutanix, Simplivity and upcoming ConvergentIO?

I think they’re great and the obvious way forward. The market is going toward services, toward fully integrated solutions. At Greenbytes we are seeing that customers are buying fully integrated virtual appliances for VDI that work. Working with our partners we deliver that kind of integrated solutions. Nutanix, Simplitivity are great. Except, they’re still the ancklebiters, the little guys – who’s going to win is the big guys.[Read more…]

As an introduction, let’s focus on what Greenbytes do and where their product adds value.

Greenbytes value proposition: VDI

The storage market is highly varied in technical solutions and there many startups with equivalent approaches. The large number of startups are hard to pin down in a framework to reveal how they relate to each other. I aim to zoom in on several storage startups that caught my attention and find out what sets them apart.